Capturing Change in Everyday Life: The Evolution of Time-Use Studies in India (1998–2024)

Abstract

Time-use research has changed the empirical understanding of work, care and everyday life in India by recording activities that conventional labour statistics often classify incompletely or omit. This critical narrative review traces the evolution of Indian time-use studies from the six-state pilot survey of 1998–99 to the first all-India survey in 2019 and the second national survey in 2024, while examining the parallel development of academic uses of these data. The review synthesises methodological literature, official survey documentation and peer-reviewed research on labour, unpaid domestic and care work, social reproduction, class and caste, child time allocation, nutrition, leisure, time poverty and survey measurement. Three changes define the field. First, time use moved from a methodological demonstration concerned with making hidden work visible to a recurring component of national statistical infrastructure. Second, international changes in the definition of work and the adoption of the International Classification of Activities for Time-Use Statistics strengthened conceptual comparability between paid, own-use and unpaid forms of work, although they did not eliminate measurement error. Third, the availability of nationally representative microdata after 2019 produced a rapid expansion of empirical research, but much of that literature remains cross-sectional and repeatedly analyses the same survey, so publication volume should not be mistaken for independent replication. Comparisons between 1998–99 and 2019 are informative only after restriction to the six common states and careful harmonisation; comparisons between 2019 and 2024 are stronger because survey architecture is more closely aligned, but they still require attention to interviewing mode, activity coding, simultaneous activities and respondent type. The review argues that the next phase should prioritise bridge studies across survey rounds, explicit treatment of proxy reporting, improved measurement of supervisory care and fragmented tasks, reproducible harmonisation, and longitudinal or linked designs capable of distinguishing behavioural change from measurement change. India now has a credible platform for monitoring the temporal organisation of social and economic life, but its analytical value depends on preserving methodological continuity while testing where continuity itself produces bias.